If the shoe was on the other foot

Richard Wagner's triumphant Ride Of The Valkyries had nothing on the glowing mood of leading Labor lights as they scrambled onto Qantas's conveniently timed F562 on Thursday evening.

The politicians on the 5.50pm aircraft are always buoyant as they flee John Stanhope's People's Republic of the ACT, but last week the ALP scrum was congratulating itself on how it handled the breaking controversy over Opposition leader Kevin Rudd's wife, Therese Rein, and the inconvenient revelation that one of her companies had underpaid staff on common-law contracts for nearly six months. Rudd, as usual, seated himself with a member of his personal staff and distanced himself from his colleagues, Stephen Smith, Wayne Swan, Simon Crean and Chris Bowen, and a gaggle of media advisers, including former Carr apparatchik Walt Secord. While Rudd dictated notes, the others reassured themselves that their leader's tone had been "serious'', and that he had "gone down well with the people upstairs (the parliamentary press gallery)''. "I think he got away with it,'' one staffer said optimistically. What he hoped Rudd was getting away with was nothing short of more of the same shameless hypocrisy that appears to be the sole tool in Labor's bag of political tricks. Having based an industrial relations campaign on snide attacks on companies and individuals who have welcomed the productivity gains to be reaped from the greater co-operation and flexibility developed through mutually agreed Australian Workplace Agreements and individual contracts, Labor had spent an anxious day hoping that the Government would adopt their tactics and attack Ms Rein personally. This the Government did not do. Not once. How different it would have played if Treasurer Peter Costello's wife, Tanya, or Prime Minister John Howard's wife, Janette, had been seen to be in the same situation as Therese Rein. For it is now clear that she deliberately shifted employees onto individual contracts in July last year, giving them an extra 45c an hour compensation for certain award conditions the employees had been used to. What utter hypocrisy, and exposed in a week when the trade union movement and Julia Gillard were attempting to exploit the issue of individual contracts by distorting the facts about the contracts issued by a family-owned small business, Goulburn's Lilac City Motel. When businesses large or small are dragged through the mud by Labor, they and their operators are painted as ruthless, heartless, capitalists out to exploit their workers _ not withstanding that the majority of examples the ACTU and others have used have proven to be false. When Therese Rein is caught out, however, Rudd and his spin doctors go into overdrive to depict her as a caring, sharing small business operator who made a harmless error. What a contrast to the deeply personal attack Labor launched on Victorian Liberal Party leader Ted Baillieu on its national website, with a Labor-sanctioned video clip sneering at his personal holdings and snide innuendos about possible conflicts of interest. Rudd has adopted a St Kevin persona, which the Canberra press gallery has let him wear like a Teflon shield. No matter what Therese Rein decides to do with her company after their family discussion today, it is becoming abundantly clear that it would be impossible to avoid the perception of conflict of interest if she were to maintain an operation that relied for much of its business on contracts with the federal Government, if her husband were ever to become Prime Minister. For all Labor's spin, this is not a story about fairness or feminist icons or the story of a modern marriage. It is a story about an international business which derives hundreds of millions of dollars of income from securing government contracts to take unemployed people off the dole. It is a story about a man who aspires to run this country who enjoys his share of the benefits earned by his wife from those government contracts, and employee contracts which gave workers an extra 45c an hour. Not the least, it is about a man who chooses his words carefully and who chose to dismiss women who contribute to their families by making a home and raising the children as mere "appendages'' to their husbands. Rudd, and Labor, are dedicated to tearing up the AWAs which, had she used them, would have given Therese Rein and her employees the flexibility to make her company operate more productively. As St Kevin, Rudd has managed to remain above the mud-slinging, the bullying and the general gutter tactics practised by his deputy, Julia Gillard. His extraordinary double standards have now been exposed by these shameful revelations.